We understand that this is very much a sensitive topic within a very passionate Bitcoin community. We aimed to clearly state, in red as to not miss this fact, that our findings reflect the Current State of Play.

We have given praise where praise is due. The LN has grown exponentially. We clearly state that LN is still in a Beta state. We also mention Acinq's release of a payment processor which should help funds grow on the network and, in tandem, routing payments successfully would grow.

And we also mention how over half of the funds are currently on 0.4% of the total nodes - a fact that seems to be missed by many, despite our clear headline. How that may develop over time is unknown - but it is, in its current state, fact.

A recent discussion with Lightning Labs Elizabeth Stark and Cointelegraph refutes our findings. Ms Stark has called the study “bullshit.”

While we may not be as graceful as Ms Stark, we would like to point out the below:

“They [Diar] also don't even acknowledge new tech like AMP, which will let people chop up a single payment through capacity on different routes. And clearly, they didn't get the memo on the payment limit on Lightning that the developers put into place, which I find hilarious! You can't route payments over the payment limit!”:

Diar has clearly addressed both points in paragraph 4 of our article:

"However, there is an effort underway for what developers have dubbed as the Atomic Multipath Payment (AMP), which would allow large LN transactions to be split into many smaller transactions and then would be automatically joined back together."

In regards to the payment limit currently set on the network of 0.042BTC (approx. $260) our analysis took into consideration $200 between random nodes which - currently - has a success rate of 1%.

This leads us to believe that Ms Stark has not actually read our article.

The benefits of a public blockchain is that information is available. Diar remains an independent publication and looks to be a data-driven analytical newsletter. As such, we earmarked many hours to confirm all the data.